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Carl Grant, president of Ex Libris North America, posted a pair of messages on his corporate blog that it is worth calling attention to regarding the OLE Project final report, if you haven’t already run into them: OLE; The unanswered questions and Library Software Solutions – We need a higher level of discourse... Equally important is the comment on the first by Brad Wheeler, Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at Indiana University. The whole thread should take about five minutes to read; five minutes well spent if you are interested in the intersection of community source software development with proprietary, closed-source software development. It is even more important if you are looking for a case study of governance issues surrounding community source software development. Go ahead…I’ll wait.

This is a preview of A Thread of Comments on the OLE Project Draft Report. Read the full post (653 words, 2:37 minutes estimated reading time)

I’m reading the notes from the Atlanta OLE Project regional workshop and right up at the top are these two statements that struck me as insightful. The first gets to the heart of how physical items in a library are different from digital items with respect to library service commitments:

With print items, we’re trying to give people access; with electronic trying to keep them out.

This stems, undoubtedly, from the first sale doctrine in copyright law; the library has purchased the item and chooses to lend it to others for a period of time. With electronic items, though, we typically agree to licenses, which — as contract law — trumps the rights given by copyright; those license are more restrictive in what we can and cannot do with the digital versions.

This is a preview of On How Physical and Electronic Differ for Library Materials. Read the full post (275 words, 1:06 minutes estimated reading time)

Coming out of the face-to-face meeting in Rutgers earlier this month, the OLE Project has posted a number of announcements for upcoming events. The first is a webcast on Nov. 20, 2008 from 3:00pm to 4:30pm Eastern Standard Time, US, free of charge and open to anyone. The webcast topics are:

Update on the project

Timeline and topics for remaining project activities

Overview of upcoming OLE workshops and invitation to attend

Overview of working groups and invitation to participate

Q&A

Registration is required; directions for accessing the webcast will be emailed to those who register. There is a limit of 200 participants (the maximum the webcast service allows), and the session will be recorded for later playback.

Richard Akerman’s recent post highlighting SOA resources at Educause reminded me about the aggregation point on Educause Connect for SOA resources. I’m assuming significant number of those interested in applying SOA to library systems are at an institution of higher education or in some related organization, so I’m adding the RSS feed for that aggregation to Planet LibrarySOA. This will undoubtedly result in a large spike of “new” postings to the planet aggregator, but should settle down after that.

This is a preview of Adding Educause Connect’s “Service Oriented Architecture” Term to Planet LibrarySOA. Read the full post (125 words, 30 seconds estimated reading time)

I am pleased to announce the formation of Planet Library SOA — an aggregation of blog postings and resources related to the application of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) software paradigm to library systems. You can follow the topic by reading the aggregation website, but the best way to follow along is by subscribing to one of the feeds (atom, rss1.0 or rss2.0) in your favorite newsreader. Those in the conversation at the beginning are Eric Schnell, Lorcan Dempsey, Richard Akerman, Stephen Anthony, and the Talis corporate blog. If you are looking for an introduction to the SOA topic with a slant towards library services, I humbly suggest you read my series on DLTJ starting with Defining “Service Oriented Architecture” by Analogy.

Adding Your Voice

If you publish on the same topic and would like to be added to the Planet Library SOA aggregator, please let me know:

This is a preview of Introducing “Planet Library SOA”. Read the full post (270 words, 1:05 minutes estimated reading time)

This month I’ve come across one great article and one great report on Service Oriented Architectures. The first came from Sally Rogers at Ohio State University in the form of an article from CIO magazine last year:

This article does a great job at laying the groundwork for the broad “what” and “why” (as well as the “why not”) of SOA, and I agree with Sally that it makes a better introduction to the topic than most of the white paper that I presented at the meeting. The two best paragraphs out of the article come towards the very end:

This is a preview of Combining Service Oriented Architecture with a Single Business Approach. Read the full post (592 words, 2:22 minutes estimated reading time)

It is my honor and pleasure to be asked to speak at a one-day symposium called “The Future of the Integrated Library System” hosted by the University of Windsor on November 15, 2006. More information can be found at the symposium wiki. I have a one-hour talk with the title “Could We Do What They Are Doing? Applying the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Model to Libraries” that will build on the library-oriented SOA postings and comments made here last month. (And I do intend to get back to the series — after all, I need to draft a whitepaper for the OhioLINK Technical Advisory Council to write on that same topic as well!)

This is a preview of “Applying the SOA Model to Libraries” talk coming up at the U-Windsor “Future of the Integrated Library System” symposium. Read the full post (330 words, 1:19 minutes estimated reading time)

I know I said I would only be taking “a day’s break” from posting about applying the Service Oriented Architecture pattern to library services but, well, real work gets in the way. Thoughts are still bubbling around — some of them have even reached draft form — but nothing new yet. In the meantime, though, take a look at this DLF Workshop on Developing a Services Framework for Digital Libraries to be held on Tuesday, November 07, 2006 in Boston. These sound like great outcomes:

This is a preview of DLF’s Upcoming Workshop on Developing a Services Framework for Digital Libraries. Read the full post (276 words, 1:06 minutes estimated reading time)

From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester (http://dltj.org/), printed on Tuesday the 3rd of March 2015 at 8:16:51 PM UTC (+0000). The URL to this page is

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